Barack Obama Said All The Right Things In His First Comments On A Syria Strike

Obama said that he has not
yet "made a decision" about authorizing a strike three times
during the interview.PBS
Newshour

Last night President Barack Obama
publicly said for the first time that the U.S. has
concluded the Syrian government carried out a chemical attack
that killed hundreds of civilians and injured thousands last
week.

Obama, knowing that are detractors
of the administration's matter-of-fact
approach, addressed the key arguments for and against limited
military response against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Speaking with the PBS Newshour's Gwen Ifill
and Judy Woodruff in the Blue Room of the
White House, Obama detailed the
basic argument for a
limited strike so that "the international norm
against the use of chemical weapons" is "kept in place" in
addition to saying the U.S. wants to avoid further direct
intervention in the
brutal civil war.

"... I’ve
also concluded is that direct military engagement, involvement
in the civil war in Syria,
would not help the situation on the ground. And so we’ve
been very restrained."

The president
brought up the "red
line" and argued that a military response to Assad's
regime using chemical weapons on his own people has to
do with "not only
international norms but also America’s core
self-interest."

"We’re consulting with the international
community. ... we do have to make sure that when
countries break international norms on weapons like chemical
weapons that could threaten us, that they are held
accountable."

And here's the perceived threat to U.S. national security
interests:

"We’ve got
allies bordering Syria. Turkey is a NATO ally, Jordan a close
friend that we work with a lot. Israel is very close by. We’ve
got bases throughout the region. We cannot see a breach of the
nonproliferation norm that allows, potentially, chemical weapons
to fall into the hands of all kinds of folks."

As for the attack itself, Obama
made a key point about who
is capable of carrying out a large scale chemical
attack:

"We do not believe that, given
the delivery
systems, using rockets, that the opposition could have
carried out
these attacks. We have concluded that the Syrian government
in fact carried these out.

The president then addressed concerns raised by long U.S.
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan:

"... we can take limited, tailored approaches, not getting drawn
into a long conflict, not a repetition of, you know, Iraq, which
I know a lot of people are worried about – but if ... we send a
shot across the bow saying, stop doing this, that can have a
positive impact on our national security over the long term ...
may have a positive impact in the sense that chemical weapons are
not used again on innocent civilians."